Baseball officially swung open its doors to spring training Wednesday under sunny skies in Arizona and Florida but under a cloud of suspicion across the nation.
As you would expect, talk of ‘roids was all the rage, from pitchers and catchers reporting for their first day at Cubs and White Sox practices to national television news reports.
This will be far from the normal spring because the steroid controversy that has entered the mainstream media and has been interjected into the national consciousness.
And position players–the ones most suspected of bulking up illegally, such as Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds–don’t even report until next week.
Those players and all their major-league brethren now are mandated legally to undergo steroid testing, although the urine cups probably won’t be passed out until sometime around March 1.
Even then, the accusations and denials still could be making news, thanks to Jose Canseco’s tell-all book that has become a bestseller in its first days of publication.
Canseco, who has admitted to using drugs, was again the topic of a “60 Minutes” segment Wednesday night, during which his former Oakland manager, Tony La Russa, said he bragged about his strength.
“He would laugh about the time that other guys were spending there and how he didn’t have to because . . . he was doing the other `helper,'” La Russa said. “He would kid our players. You know, it was a joke with him.”
Both La Russa and then-general manager Sandy Alderson, now an MLB executive vice president, said they were helpless to do anything about it because “there was no testing policy that would allow us to confirm or deny any of the rumors that existed,” Alderson said.
White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, who played during the Canseco era, said he was sorry Canseco pointed the finger at other players and that guilty players were sullying the national pastime.
“If it’s true or not [they were using steroids], that’s their problem,” Guillen said at Sox camp in Tucson, Ariz. “We have to be careful because they are ruining the name of the game.”
“It’s going to be a tough year as far as a [public-relations] hit for baseball, dealing with this issue,” Cubs player representative Mark Prior said after reporting in Mesa, Ariz.
It is an issue that has crossed camp borderlines and even state lines.
In Ft. Myers, Fla., where the world champion Red Sox train, former teammate Trot Nixon defended Cubs shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, whose name had been whispered in steroid rumor circles. Nixon told the Boston Herald there was never any talk in the Boston clubhouse about it.
“No, because I know how Nomar works,” Nixon said. “That’s an opinion of someone else, someone who doesn’t know Nomar.
“Obviously, fans are going to wonder this, wonder that. Major League Baseball should have someone go out and buy some sneakers, shoes, socks and shorts, and go out and work out with Nomar sometime. There is genetics involved there. Nomar has good genetics. He watches what he eats too. . . . Go work out with Roger [Clemens]. If you suspect him, go work out with him.”
And on and on it goes.
In Tampa, where the Yankees train and have such players as Giambi and Gary Sheffield–not to mention the New York media–manager Joe Torre spent the first 33 minutes of his 45-minute meeting with the press talking about steroids.
“It’s not going away, unfortunately,” Torre said. “I’m looking forward to baseball to sort of override any of the other stuff you’re going to have to deal with. But that’s reality.”
Sheffield, who appeared before a grand jury investigating BALCO, has admitted to rubbing “cream” on his body during workouts with Bonds. “Cream” is believed to contain a steroid developed by BALCO.
“When people sit here and say I didn’t know I took steroids–I didn’t take steroids,” he told the New York Daily News. “The bottom line is I put rubbing cream on my leg, and if somebody says that’s steroids, that’s a bunch of hogwash.
“People are going to put a spin on whatever they’re going to put a spin on. . . . I’m not like Jason Giambi, I’m not going to sit here and cry about things being unfair or attacks are unfair.”
So it is obvious steroids will be the focus in spring camps.
“Unfortunately, I do [think that],” Cubs reliever Mike Remlinger said. “It’s a big issue and something we hope with the agreement we got this winter we can put it behind us and move forward. [But] the way things are, something keeps popping up every other week. And you deal with it. Hopefully it’s part of the past of the game.”
That is not likely, if only because of Canseco’s book claiming he shot steroids into the buttocks of then-teammate Mark McGwire.
Now the public and even the players look on big hitters as suspects.
“You look at certain people and you wonder how they get so big, but as far as what [Canseco] is claiming went on in the stalls and stuff like that? I qualify that as information I don’t need to have,” Remlinger said. “You do what you do and hopefully you do it naturally, and you just go out and let your talent speak for itself, along with hard work. If other people don’t want to do that, that’s their problem.”
Baseball players overcame the strike that zapped the World Series a decade ago, albeit with the bulging-biceps heroics of McGwire and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa in 1998. Steroids may pose as big a public-relations problem at winning back the public trust.
“It’s troubling,” Prior said. “This is my fourth season and I’m still pretty young in the league. But ever since my second year, this cloud of steroid use has been hanging over us. It definitely has painted a darker picture of what it used to be.
“This is still a great league, still a great game, and still a game that’s deeply rooted in this country’s history. So if we can get to the root of this, hopefully in the next year or two, and really clean it up and get the integrity back, I think this game will thrive again.”
